Now she toyed with a yellow oxlip, now paused at a purple lungwort; but most she went into the garden, and hovered, still as a humming-bird, among the rose-leaves and branches, especially those growing against the sun-bathed old wooden porch, and for so long that one wondered what she was doing there. She was licking up the "honey-dew," which, translated, is the juice exuded by the plant-lice or "green-fly," which swarmed all over the rose-trees. This "honey-dew" was sweet, and in great demand among such insects as had tastes that way; in fact, the enterprising ants—who are always a decade ahead of everybody else—were, in one place, building mud sheds over the said herds of plant-lice to prevent their precious "honey-dew" being exploited by others.
Thus a week passed, the queen fussing daily about her embryo city, adding paper covering here, strengthening a wall there, warning off an inquisitive insect somewhere else, and adding her heat to the natural stuffiness of the place, though one would scarcely have thought she could have made much difference. At times, too, in the hot sun, she appeared here or there outside, drinking honey from some flower, or sipping "honey-dew," much to the ants' disgust and anger.
Then, at the end of the week, the first egg hatched out within the city, and, frankly, what came forth was not lovely. It was a legless grub, fat, presumably blind, and helpless; and it would have fallen head downwards out of the cell, as it hatched, if it had not had the sense to hook its tail into its own egg-shell, which in turn, as we know, was already fastened to the top of the cell. But it had jaws, and in addition, apparently, an appetite to use them.
Whether the queen loved it, her first baby, was hard to tell. Did she, indeed, ever love anything? She certainly did her duty by it; but what was the use of setting up to be a queen, anyway, if she could not do that? And, moreover, you've got to do your duty in the wild. There's no profit in monkeying with Nature, as is possible with civilization, for the penalty thereof is death.
Wherefore did our queen, after making quite sure that the sack-like atom with a mouth, hanging upside-down in the cell, and wriggling like anything to show its hunger, was alive, sound, and quite all there, quit home in a hurry, and with a loud buzz, in search of rations. But there was a change in her manner from that adopted when looking for food for herself, and for good reason.Thenher object had been honey; now it was—scalps!
From force of habit, more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal "white" grapes. That she was challenged by a sentry ant—about as big to her as a bulldog to us—that the sentry gave the alarm, that the guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.
She had got her scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it upon green-fly. The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious, mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless, fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one. Here maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it was maternity all the same.
By this time other eggs in other cells were splitting, and giving out legless grub horrors, as seeds that give forth plants, each wriggling mummy taking care to hook itself up to its shell by the tail at once, lest it perish. And the queen's work from that moment really began. Till then she had only tinkered at it, apparently. Now she got going "real some," and—well, all the insect world outside knew it. The terror of the yellow flag spread.
Upon an hour she would appear, dropping, hawk-like and terrible, out of the sun-glare, and neatly pick up a soft and juicy caterpillar from a cabbage-stalk. Upon another hour she would be discovered, feet tucked up and wary, darting, like an iridescent gleam, around the angry ants, among the green-fly on the rose-bushes. The drowsy hum of the kettle on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window, like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later with a helpless fly between her jaws. The first heat of the sun, drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full, sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out the cool shade of the larder, where she had been carving meat, and "when the sun mended his twisted copper nets," he would flash in bronze from her glistening cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or palsied fly fast locked in her jaws—and all for her young, all for her couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under the secret earth.
Time was when these same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger, incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state. Then the queen's labor lightened a little for a period, so that you could again see her at spare moments sucking nectar from the flowers for herself, robbing the jam-dish, or lapping up the "honey-dew" of the green-fly.
Finally cametheday. It dawned all right, and there was nothing about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was the day of Fate.
A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that during the night things had been happening and changes taking place. The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the silken screens.
The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes. And, almost as if the hum had called it, there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the comb, a—a thing.
She knew by instinct that it was an enemy. Indeed, it could not well be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.
It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster. It was a fearsome apparition, and very much larger even than the queen. The good God alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently amok.
But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk. It was a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the awakening city with her, should be cut off—unthinkable and impossible, unthinkable and maddening. Therefore she fought as few wasps have probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents, and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.
The battle that followed was awful.
Almost at the start the two insects, grappling, fell headlong to the excavation the queen had made below the city, and there, rolling over and over, continued the struggle in the dark among the refuse, the queen eternally feeling with her poison-dagger for a space to drive home her death-blow between the other's smooth, shining armor-plates; the cricket eternally endeavoring to behead the queen between its awful jaws.
It was a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not last long. It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly wicked for that.
Suddenly the queen's body shot out like a spring. The opening she had been feeling for had appeared, and she had driven her death-blow home. At the same instant, with a supreme effort, she bent double and shot herself free, the last convulsive, shearing crush of her foe's laws clashing to so close above her head that they actually caught in their death-grip, and held, till she pulled them out by the roots, two bristles of her neck.
And then—well, then the queen hurried back up to her city, just in time to help out of its cell the first of her children—and citizens at last—the first limp, clambering, damp, newly painted, freshly bedecked young worker-wasp, perfect from feeler to sting, from wing to claw.
Quickly they broke out now from the cocoons, and the queen bustled from one to the other, assisting, cleaning, encouraging; for it is a tricky job for an insect to come out of its chrysalis-case. The queen's work, however, was really done; for, though for a day or two, till their cuirasses and wings hardened, these new young worker-wasps only did light labor, acting as nurses to the others that were following, and so on, they quickly took upon their own shoulders the whole of the work of the city: the nursing and feeding of the young, the hunting, the building, the scavenging, and the waiting upon and feeding the queen-mother herself completely, so that she should henceforth labor not, nor fight, nor waste herself in the chase, but should keep at home and lay countless eggs, and eggs, and always nothing but eggs, for the workers to rear for the benefit of the State.
To-day that city has a population of nearly 60,000, and contains over 11,000 cells; and the queen is still there, laying eggs, eggs, and again eggs, till—
Sharp's the word with her.—SWIFT.
Some people never know when they are well off. It is a complaint which afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from. The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"—which is vernacular for a bunnies' nursery—and thinking how nice raw, pink baby-rabbit would taste if she got the chance to sample it. She didn't. At least, she hadn't for an hour and a half; but, then, what's an hour and a half to a cat? Apparently the silver tabby could wait, just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of doom—or dawn.
Mind you, she was not alone. She had company. One always has in the wild at night, or nearly always. You couldn't see that company, but I don't know whether the silver tabby could. Who can tell how much a cat sees, anyway? Nor do I think the company could see her, she being still, and wild eyes not being good at picking out the still form. Neither could they hear her, for she said nothing; neither did she purr. They must have smelt her, though. Anyway, she seemed to be a little island in the mist—the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist—where nobody walked. You could hear them—a rustle here, a squeak there, a thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig—this only once—a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room to think. Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild; lonely creatures, they are best left alone.
No mother-rabbit came to the "stop"—which the cat knew to be there—to feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there, too. No baby-rabbits came out to be fed—or to feed the cat either. "Stops" are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also. The little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.
Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night—a thud, hollow, resounding, and noticeable. It was repeated after an interval, and again repeated. There was a certain note of insistence about it—like a signal. And if the cat had been a wild creature she would have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later, or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a signal, and they meant that the game was up. In other words, some wily old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind, had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit, squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet to say so and warn all off whom it might concern. The silver tabby, however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know. She sat on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits thereabouts.
She sat, or hunched, or crouched, or couched, or whatever you call that precise position of cats, which is neither lying down nor sitting up, for some time longer—for another twenty minutes, to be precise; and all the while the thuds of mystery serenaded her from nowhere in particular out of the dark—and from down-wind.
Then she must have come to the conclusion that she was being made a fool of, for she got up, stretched herself lazily, with arched back and bared claws, and yawned a bored feline yawn. And even as she did so she was aware of a sudden final flourish of thuds, and then dead-silence. Next moment, in that same dead-silence, she distinctly heard something coming towards her, and that something was taking no pains to conceal the fact.
Now, in the wild it is not the custom to go towards anything and take no pains to conceal the fact. The unhealth of such a procedure is swiftly borne in upon such rash ones as make the experiment, and they seldom live long enough to pass their folly on. Only the mighty can afford not to walk circumspectly, and they are very few, and, with man about, even they have learnt wisdom. That is why the wild is so guarded, and why self-effacement becomes almost a religion therein.
Even the cat knew this, I fancy. Anyway, she looked surprised as she crouched again, and quickly.
Now, of all the wild-people, probably one of the most brazen is the pig; it is also one of the bravest. I mean, the wild pig. And it would seem that he, or she, who came that way was a pig, only a precious little one. You know the ways of a pig? How you can hear him coming long before he comes; how he must snuffle, and grunt, and poke dead leaves, and snort, and tread on things, and snore. Very good. So it was here; and these things did this new-comer, who approached through the mist—only all in a dwarfed way, as if they were done by a tiny grown-up pig. Its gruntings were almost to itself; its snortings, snorings, and sniffings quite small; and its snorts little miniature ones. Only, in the profound silence of the night, and in comparison with the furtive noises of all the rest of the night-wild, they sounded quite loud.
The cat, as she crouched, passed from supercilious surprise to amazement. You could tell that by the roundness of her eyes. She had no knowledge of pigs, and had never met any of the wild-folk gone mad; yet it seemed that one must have done so now, and that one—to her growing uneasiness—was coming straight towards her. I fancy that in that moment she thought of the warm fire, the singing kettle, the saucer of milk, and Miss Somebody's best arm-chair.
The thing, whatever it was, came straight on in a more or less zigzag line, till the cat could make it out dimly in the moonlight, a blotched, roughly egg-shaped form, less than a foot long, so low to the ground that it appeared to be running on wheels, and covered all over with prickles, like a Rugby ball into which tin tacks had been driven head first, the sharp ends pointing outwards and backwards. Its head was the small end, and much lower than its back. Its eyes, little and pig-like, set in a black cowl, gleamed red in the tired moonlight; and its face was the face of a pig, nothing else—just pure pig; insolent, cunning, vulgar, and blatant. Occasionally men name a wild beast correctly, and this little beast could only have one name—hedgehog: It was obvious on the face of it.
But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said, nothing about pigs, real or only so called. She had killed a shrew once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan, Insectivora—far removed from the pigs, really—and that is the nearest she had got.
She had never heard of hedgehogs, and never, never met a beast that walked through the wild as if he owned it. And, more, he expected her to get out of his way, which she did with feline and concentrated remarks; and he—by the whiskers and talons!—the fool exposed his back—turned his back openly, a thing no wild beast in its senses would do, unless running away. And that, for a cat who had waited close on two hours for baby business that didn't turn up, had got most unfashionably drenched, and had, moreover, in her time, tackled more than one grown-up rabbit, which was considerably larger than any hedgehog—that, I say, was, for the silver tabby, too much.
She sprang. Rather, she executed two bounds, and somewhat unexpectedly found herself on top of the hedgehog. I say "unexpectedly," because she had hitherto bounded upon wild-folk who contrived mostly not to be there. This one contrived nothing, except to stop still. And the cat executed a third bound—offthe hedgehog, and rather more violently and more quickly than the first two. Also, she spat.
When she had got over the intense pain—and cats feel pain badly—of sharp spines digging into her soft and tender forefoot-pads, she stopped, about two yards away, and glared at the hedgehog as if he had played off a foul upon her, and she was surprised to see that he was no longer egg-shaped, but rolled up into himself like a ball, so to speak, and utterly quiescent. (I wonder if she remembered the little wood-lice that she had so often amused herself playing with in idle hours. They rolled themselves up just like that. Perhaps she thought she'd come upon the Colossus of all the wood-lice.) Anyway, after she had spat off at him all the vile remarks she could think of for the moment, without producing any more reply than she would get from the average stone, she came back, drawn with curiosity as by strings.
The hedgehog did not move; there was no need. It was for the cat to make the next move—if she chose. He did not care. All things were one to him, and all the views which he presented to the world were points, acheval-de-frise, a coiled ball of barbed wire, a living Gibraltar, what you will, but, anyway, practically impregnable; and the beggar knew it. "He who believeth doth not make haste"—that seemed to be his motto, and he had, by the same token, a fine facility for withstanding a siege.
He felt the cat, that cat who did not know hedgehogs, pat him tentatively. Then he heard her swearing softly and tensely at the painful result. She did not pat again—at least, only once, and, in spite of care, that hurt her worse than ever. Then she began growling, low and beastily—for all the cat tribe have a horrible growl; you may have noticed it. Perhaps the hedgehog smiled. I don't know. He knew that growl, anyhow; had heard it before—the anger of utter exasperation. He was an exasperating brute, too, for he never said anything, only shut himself up, and let others do the arguing, if they were fools enough to do so.
Suddenly he heard the growl stop. Followed a tense pause, during which he tightened his back-muscles under his spines, and tucked himself in, to meet any coming shock, more tightly than ever. Followed the pause a short warning hiss, jerked out almost in fright, it seemed—that cat's hiss that is only a bluff, and meant to imitate a snake—a sudden explosion of snarls, and a thud. A fractional silence, then a perfect boil-over of snarls, and thud upon thud.
Now, our friend hedgehog was an old hand, and he had heard many and curious sounds take place outside himself, so to speak; but, all the same, he was just tickled to death to know what, in claws and whiskers, was happening out there in the leering moonlight now; so much so, indeed, that at last he risked it, and took a furtive peep out of a chink in himself, as it were. And what he saw might have amazed him, if he had not been a hedgehog and scarcely ever amazed at anything. He just got a snapshot view of the cat's fine ringed tail whirling round and round as she balanced herself on the swerve, vanishing into the ghostly moonlight haze of the night; and in front of him, close beside him, squatting, stare-eyed and phlegmatic, he saw the form of a big, gaunt, old doe-rabbit. And I think he knew what had happened. He seemed to, anyway, and remained rolled up.
Rabbits are thoughtless, headstrong, headlong, hopeless, helpless cowards as a race and a rule. "The heart of a rabbit," they say in France, speaking of a coward. But all races and rules have exceptions. Occasionally the exceptions are old buck-rabbits, who know a thing or two; but more often they are old doe-rabbits with young. And, mark you, from the point of view of those wild-folk, there may be easier rough handfuls to tackle than old doe-rabbits with young. This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere—and behind—and knocked the cat flying before she knew. Then, ere ever the feline could gather her wits, the old doe had descended upon her with an avalanche of blows—punches they were with the forefeet, all over the head and the nose, where a cat hates to be hit—and all so swiftly, so irresistibly, that that cat had never been given a chance to consider before she was stampeded into the night. It was the silver tabby's first experience of Mrs. Rabbit doing the devoted-mother act, and, by the look of her—tail only—and the speed at which she was going, it appeared most likely that it would be her last.
"This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"[Illustration: "This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"]
"This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"[Illustration: "This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"]
Meanwhile the old doe-rabbit sat there in the moonlight as immovable and impassive as a Buddha, and the hedgehog, peering at her, guessed that the time to unroll was not yet. He knew that it would hurt any one to attack him; the cat knew it; all rabbits in their senses knew it; but was that mother-rabbit in her senses? He concluded to lie low and remain a fortress, therefore.
Then, after waiting about five minutes, as if she knew that cats sometimes steal back, the old doe-rabbit came to a "stop" quite close to the hedgehog, and went in. She remained there some time, during which a fox came by and sniffed at the hedgehog, but was quite wise as to the foolishness of doing more; and a deadly, curved-backed, flat-headed little murderer of a stoat galloped by, and sniffed too, but was no bigger fool than the fox, and went his way.
Both missed the "stop" by about two yards, though I don't know what would have happened if they had found it. Digging and death in the former case, and battle and blood in the latter, perhaps. But no matter, they passed on their unlawful occasions; and half-an-hour after the going of the stoat the old doe-rabbit came out, and dissolved into the moon-haze.
Then the hedgehog came out, too—of himself, and—well, dissolved into the "stop."
What happened in there it was too dark to see, but not to hear; and what one could hear was—pitiful. He was there some time, for your hedgehog rarely hurries; and when he came out again, his little pig's eyes gleaming red under their spined cowl, it was with the same snuffling, softly grunting deliberation with which he had gone in; but the pale moon, that showed the gleam in his eyes, showed also blood on his snout, and on the bristles of his forefeet, blood.
Then, slowly, snorting, sniffing very audibly—as loud as a big dog often does—grunting softly in an undertone, as if talking to himself, he departed, rustling through the grass, leaving an irregular winding track behind in the dew and the gossamer, as he searched, eternally searched, for food.
The hedgehog moved through the night as if he owned it and had no fear of anything on earth; but many, it would seem, had cause to fear him. He turned and snorted, and snatched up a slug. Three very quick and suggestive—quite audible—scrunches, and it was gone. He described a half-circle, sniffing very loudly, and chopped up a grub. He paused for a fraction to nose out a beetle, and disposed of it with the same quick three or four chopping scrunches. (It sounded rather like a child eating toast-crusts.) He continued, always wandering devious, always very busy and ant-like, always snorting loudly; grabbed another beetle, and then a worm—all by scent, apparently—and reached the hedge-ditch, where, in the pitch-darkness, he could still be heard snorting and scrunching hapless insects, slugs, and worms at scarcely more than one-minute intervals. And he never stopped. He seemed to have been appointed by Nature as a sort of machine, a spiked "tank," to sniff tirelessly about, reducing the surplus population of pests, as if he were under a curse—as, indeed, the whole of the great order of little beasts to which he belonged, the Insectivora, are—which, afflicting him with an insatiable hunger, drove him everlastingly to hunt blindly through the night for gastronomic horrors, and to eat 'em. Anyway, he did it, and in doing it seemed to make himself worthy of the everlasting thanks and protection of the people who owned that land—thanks which to date he had never received.
Strange to say, he never stopped of his own free-will, though he was stopped: once when he walked up to a man kneeling—and he was a poacher—and did not see him till, if I may so put it, the man coughed, when he ran like winkle into the hedge, and promptly became a ball for ten minutes; and once when he came upon a low, long, sinister, big, and grunting shadow, which again, if I be allowed the term, he did not see, though quite close, till he heard it grunt, when he instantly jerked himself into a ball on the spot and in the open. In both cases it seemed, on the face of it, more as if he had scented, rather than had either seen or heard, the dangers, and in both cases he had come within two yards of them—though they were not hidden—before scenting, seeing, or hearing them, whichever he did do.
Now, books and men have said that friend hedgehog fears only two things: gypsies and badgers—who eat him. I should not be surprised at anything the "gyp" did; nor, to this day, can we stake much on our knowledge of the secret badger; but this badger, at any rate, seemed to know nothing of books and men. He was delving for roots when the hedgehog cast up out of the night and jumped him to "attention" by his loud sniffs—much like a big dog's, I said. Thereafter, however, when our prickly friend was represented as a ball only, and was as silent as the grave, the badger took no further notice of him, beyond keeping one eye—the weather eye—upon him, and treating him to a low growl, or curse, truly, from time to time.
The hedgehog, however, once there, did not seem keen upon unrolling and exposing himself till the badger had gone, which it did finally, vanishing so suddenly and unexpectedly into the dark as almost to seem to have been a ghost. And after some minutes the hedgehog straightened out, and ate his way—one can call it nothing else—to the hedge. Here he came upon a wounded mouse, complaining into the night in a little, thin voice, because its back was broken, and it could not return to its hole. It was a harvest mouse, rejoicing in the enormous weight of 4.7 grains and a length of 57 mm., but with as much love of life and fear of death as an elephant. Heaven knows what had smitten it! Perhaps it was one of the very few who just escape the owl, or who foil that scientific death, the weasel, at the last moment—but no matter. The result was the same—death, anyway.
The hedgehog saw its eyes shining like stars in a little jet of moonlight, and I fear the hedgehog slew far less adroitly than the owl, and not nearly so scientifically as the weasel; but he slew, none the less, and he did that which he did.
From thence we find our hedgehog, still wandering devious, but with always a direction, just as an ant has, heading his way down-ditch to a farm, and all the way he ate—beetles mostly, but with slugs and worms thrown in.
Now, those of the wild-folk who approach the farm, even by night, do so with their life in their paws, and most of them know it. Far, far safer would it be to remain in wood or field-hedge, gorse-patch or growing crop. Yet they go, like the adventurers of old.
First of all, if he approached by ditch, before getting to the farm proper, the hedgehog knew that he must pass the entrenchments of the rat-folk, and that alone was enough to put off many, for the rat-folk are no longer strictly wild, and, wild or tame, are hated with that cordiality that only fear can impose. I don't know that our hedgehog was given to fearing anything very much. He came of a brave race, and one cursed, moreover, with a vile, quick temper, more than likely to squash in its incipient stage any fear that might threaten to exist; but he did most emphatically detest rats, except to eat them—a compliment which the rats would have returned, if they had got a chance.
As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that Prickles—for such was the name of our hedgehog—would have gone that risky way, traveled so unhealthily far, left his more or less—mostly less—safe home wood at all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with men—in the warm seasons—their fancy turns to thoughts of love. Prickles's fancy had so turned, not lightly, for he was of an ancient and antediluvian race, heavy in thought, but certainly to love. And love, I want you to realize, in the wild, or anywhere else, for the matter of that, is the very devil. "Unite and multiply; there is no other law or aim than love," one great savant despairingly assorts is Nature's cry, and adds that she mutters to herself under her breath, "and exist afterwards if you can. That is no concern of mine."
To be precise, Prickles, who did more business with his nose than all the rest of his organs put together, was following a love-trail. A lady hedgehog, a flapper undoubtedly, and beautiful—all loves are beautiful in imagination—had passed that way. Whythatunhealthful way, Heaven knew; but, allowing for the capriciousness of the sex, and mad because in love, Prickles followed, slowly, deliberately, heavily, as befitted one descended from one of the oldest races on earth.
The air was heavy with the scent of may and of honeysuckle, and his way was a green-gold—silver where the moon cascaded down the hedge—and blue-black bridal-path, arched with scented swords, strewn with pink and rose and cream and white confetti of blossom. But he only saw and smelt one thing, and that, those who have known hedgehogs intimately will agree, is not like unto the scent of any blossom.
Prickles was ruminating anciently upon these things, possibly, and others, as he came down the trench—ditch, I mean—when the cry smote him. It smote everything—the filtered silence of the wonderful, tranquil night, the pale moon half-light, the furtive rustling shadows that stopped rustling, the wonderful breathing pulse of growing vegetation. And Prickles stopped as abruptly as if it had smitten him on his nose, too. He heardthat, at any rate, whatever might have been hinted about the value of his ears elsewhere.
There was no doubt about that cry, no possible shadow of doubt whatever—it was a cry of extreme distress, a final, despairing S.O.S., flung out to the night in the frantic hope that one of the same species would hear and help.
Several night-foraging wild-folk have S.O.S. signals of their own, but none like this. It was not a rabbit's cry, for bunny's signal is thin and child-like; nor a hare's, for puss's last scream is like bunny's, only more so; nor a stoat's, for that is instinct with anger as well as pain; nor a cat's, for that thrills with hate; nor an owl's, for that is ghostly; nor a fox's, for Reynard is dumb then; nor a rat's, for that is gibbering and devilish; nor a mouse's, for that is weak and helpless. Then what? And why had it touched up Prickles as if with a live wire? It was perhaps the rarest S.O.S. signal of all heard in the wild, or one of the rarest, the peculiar, high, chattering, pig-like, savage tremolo of a hedgehog booked for some extra deathly form of death. And Prickles—naturally he knew it.
It came from straightaway down the ditch; from ahead, where Prickles had been heading for; from the farm, and Heaven know what it portended! Perhaps, too, Prickles could tell a lady hedgehog's S.O.S. from that of a gentleman of the same breed; or, perhaps—but how do I know? He certainly acted that way.
Prickles waited the one-fifth part of an instant, to listen and locate. Then he got going, and provided one astonishment. Till then he had seemed slow as the times he had descended from—like a rhinoceros. But, like a rhino, he proved that he could shift some when hustled. He did. It looked like suddenly releasing a clockwork toy wound up to breaking-point. His short legs gave this impression, and his next-to-no-neck, giving him a look of rigidity, assisted it. He did not run so much as rush, and his spines and bristles, coming low on either side in an overhang, so to speak, like an armored car, made him rustle and scuffle tremendously. Three rabbits doing the same act, or five cats, could scarce have made more row than he did.
It was not, however, so much the fact that Prickles had gone that was so noticeable as the fact that he hadarrived. His arrival seemed to follow his going as one slide follows another on a screen. One would never have believed such quickness of him; nor, as a matter of fact, do I think he would have believed it of himself; but—well, love is a mighty power, and makes folks do some strange things.
What he found was two ditch-banks, pock-marked with the untidy dug-outs of the rat-people, smelling ratty, and looking worse, one original ray of moonlight lighting the beaten ditch between. In the moonlight one young female hedgehog, who may have been pretty by hedgehog standards, but was now pretty by none, and five rats, frankly beastly, very busy indeed with that same hedgehog. They must have caught that young lady of the spikes "napping"—a rare thing. Yet, allowing for the fact that she was in love—with love and nothing else, so far—and careless, or allowing that she may have mistaken the unclean ones momentarily, she may have given them one brief half-instant. And it doesn't do to give a rat even the half of a half-instant. If you do, he has got you, or you haven't got him.
Apparently they had pretty well got her before she could quite roll up, and in a half-rolled-up condition she was doing her best to meet the jabs of five pairs of gnawing, cold-chisel, incisor, yellow-rats' teeth at once. To time, apparently, she had not been successful in the attempt—you could see the dark stains of blood glisten in the moonlight, and the end was certain, on the face of it.
Prickles, however, was a new factor that had got to short-circuit that end, and Prickles didn't wait to meditate prehistoricallythattime. He came. He came full tilt into the midst of the mêlée like—well, like a clockwork toy still, that couldn't stop. Only he did stop, against the biggest rat of all, ducking his head, and jerking forward his shoulder-muscles, and spines, with a sort of a thrust over his head, and a noise like a pair of expiring bellows; and the prickles hit home.
That rat removed about one foot in one bound in one-fortieth of a second, and he let rip one squeal in the process that sent away every other rat into the nearest available hole as if it had been fired there from a spring. Then the lady hedgehog took the Heaven-sent opportunity to complete her rolling-up completely, and Prickles took his own created opportunity to roll up almost more completely, and—well, they were rolled up into two balls, you see, and there is nothing more to be said about them. The rats did that, but it was all they did, except hurt their noses presently, and delicate, pink, hand-like fore-paws, and make 'em bleed on prickles. They were very angry indeed, those unspeakable ones—very angry; but it didn't make any difference to the hedgehogs. They were there; they were rolled up; they were together. Whatcouldmake any difference afterthat? And at last, when the rats gave them up as a very bad job, they went awaytogether, and that's all there is to say.Togetherclinches it, you understand.
Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a cottage of four rooms. He "did" for himself. Every housekeeper will know what "did" for himself means. But he did for himself in another way also. He came to read up for an exam. He told everybody this, which was one reason why he would be seen at ungodly hours, when no one was about, going to and from lonely spots, with a pair of blue glasses on his nose, a book under one arm, and a walking-stick with a silver band and a tassel—he was always careful to display the silver band and the tassel—under the other.
Then Nemesis descended upon him.
He was caught by Colonel Lymington's head-keeper on Colonel Lymington's most strictly preserved wild-bird sanctuary, shooting certain rare birds—many rare birds. Now, the colonel prided himself on his sanctuary, and upon the number of rare birds he had living therein, and the colonel was wroth. Hawkley had, in fact, ruined the sanctuary, and taken or slain pretty well every other bird worth having in the place, so that five years would not make good the harm he had done. Moreover, it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his cat—especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.
No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy, in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went. He went more quickly than was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the police of another district—several other districts, I think—to say that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on his face, and was no more seen.
So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat. He left it at home in the cottage—which shows that he must have been badly scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's agent, such as Hawkley was. But perhaps he left it by way of revenge. I do not know. Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa before the fire—just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities, had left it that morning.
It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when the cat, Pharaoh, woke up, and transformed himself instantly from deep sleep to strained alertness, in that way which is peculiar to the children of the wild, but has been lost by their domestic degenerates. The sun was shining full in at the little diamond-paned window. The window was open, and a late fly of metallic hue was shooting about with a pinging noise, like the twang of some instrumental string. But neither fly, nor sun, nor the tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece had awakened the cat. It was the click of the little front-gate latch.
The cat—the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow stone—gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square" bowler hat—not often seen these days—and a red face with small eyes, and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. The cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread. Hawkley had a white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes—the eyes that an animal may love and trust. Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon. Anyway, he acted as if he did.
Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and to the door leading into the scullery. For a moment he stopped, looking back over his shoulder, one paw uplifted, body drooping on bent legs, inscrutable, fierce eyes staring. Then he was gone.
I don't know how he went. He just seemed to fade out in the frame of the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a dissolving picture.
A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.
Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new flood of light, and—silence. Only the one or two late flies "pinged," while the little clock fairly raced.
The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.
He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in. He had come to find "that there pesky cat." And in this, perhaps, he showed more sense than most people gave him credit for. Apparently, he had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary cat—and cats of any kind are bad enough—and certainly he guessed that the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse, calamity.
The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep. No cat there. His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this search. Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished—had, in fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.
Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the holly-hedge through which he was sliding. He growled under the punishment. Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such cases, though they may "swear."
Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other side, turned to his right, and galloped up it. It ran upwards, skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth. They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.
The cat's gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, long, his head low, his forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind. So does the tiger gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.
There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had him on the move and could see. He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with "faint pale stripes" well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and "whippy," ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh, quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.
Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound following his trail up the ditch. And least of all beasts had that cat delusions. He turned and galloped on. The keeper's dog was of an independent turn of mind. He had quietly run that cat's trail, forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver independently, and may suffer if they do so. You see him flying up the trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and with a fine amount of what huntsmen call "drive."
Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood. He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt it rebound right on to his back.
The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of his life.
Even an ordinary domestic "puss" can make wonderful havoc of a dog's back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got the cat's "leave to go," he went rather sooner than at once, proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master, coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him afar off, and swore.
As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too. He went straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath. A lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley, I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be following up behind.
Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy. The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted, gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed with rabbit-runs; a world unto itself.
The cat moved on quickly into the heart of the furze, pausing every few strides to listen and glare round. Several times he sniffed the sickly grass and the carpet of dead spikes.
Once or twice something moved ahead; a branch was shaking as he came up, a blade of grass slowly righting itself, as if something that had been sitting upon it had but just stolen away. All round were hints of life, but no life was visible. It was as if the cat were moving through an army of ghosts.
Then, in a flash, without any kind of hint or warning to prepare one for the unnerving contrast of the change, was war—raw, red war.
There had come up a rabbit-run—a regular rabbit-turnpike—a creature. It was strikingly colored, that creature, and big—nearly three feet long, to be exact; but it looked much bigger in the ghostly twilight—and yet till it was actually upon him he, even he, had failed to see it.
Long, low, bear-like, and burly, with claws caked with earth, gashed and bleeding on flank and shoulder it was, red-fanged and wild-eyed. It charged home upon Pharaoh without a second's pause, and with an obscene chatter that was unnerving to any one, let alone so highly strung a bag of tricks as a cat.
Men and dogs had been besieging this badger in its den for twelve hours. It had in the end made a desperatesortie, upset one man who had failed to grab its tail, run into and bitten another, and got clean away. Pharaoh was unfortunate in that he stood between the half-mad beast and another den for which it was making.
There was no time to go back, no room to execute one of those beautiful lightning side-leaps which are the pride of all the cats, and less to spring into the air, a neat trick of the tribe which it has also perfected.
The cat was cornered, and, being cornered, fought like—a cornered cat! That is to say, an electrified devil.
He reared up. He struck, pat! pat! right and left, with the terrible, rending, full stroke of his kind. He met open jaws with open jaws—you could hear fang clash against fang. He grabbed, scrunched, drew back, grabbed, scrunched again, as a lion will—for the cats neither hold fast like a weasel nor snap like a wolf. Then, as the full force of the charge and the weight of the enemy's body—some twenty-seven and a half pounds—took him, he hugged, round-arm fashion, with his talons, and, still grabbing and scrunching, rolled over backwards.
Cat and badger turned into a ball—a parti-colored ball, very lively as to its center, and it whirled. Unfortunately there was not much room to whirl in. That made things all the more grisly. You could almost see the grim skeleton shape of death, hovering over that growling, snarling, spitting, worrying, tearing, kicking, gnashing, scrunching, foaming, blood-flecked Catherine-wheel—almost see death, I say, bending down with upraised arm ready to strike. But death never struck.
In an instant there came, sounding strangely hollow in that still, damp air of dusk, as though it were in a cave, the unmistakable noise of a deep, dry, hacking cough. Truly, it was nothing much—just a good old churchy and human cough. But it might have been a blast from the trumpet of the archangel Gabriel himself by the effect it had upon the two combatants. They shot apart like released electrified dust-atoms, and—pff!—they were gone—wiped out. Like pricked bubbles, they had ceased to be. And neither gave any explanation. Being wild things, of course they wouldn't.
The cough had only come from a laborer, who, passing along a pathway through the furze, had heard the commotion, and stopped. He never saw anything, though he crashed into the furze and hunted—he never saw anything, which was no wonder, seeing that he could hardly have selected a way to see less. The cat was four hundred yards away by that time, and goodness knows where the badger was—-deep down in his den, one presumes.
Later the cat slept, in a fortress of nature safe enough, surrounded by a hundred unseen sentries with brown jackets and white tails—rabbits, who would give him all the warning he required.